February 12, 2010

Making the move to Windows 7 Professional 64 brought about a plethora of problems, some minor and some not so minor.

Fortunately most of the troubles were shared with other developers, and information is there to be found using our favourite search engines.

If you’re a Flex developer, like me, you might not have as much luck. If you’ve downloaded the latest (stable) Flex SDK—3.4.1 at the time of this writing—it’s not possible to set up your “Installed Flex SDKs”, in order to set this SDK as the compiler default from the Preferences dialog. That’s because of an issue on current x64 Windows where controls won’t get resized once the nesting hierarchy of windows exceeds a certain depth, which was referred to from the only useful information I could find about this specific issue. It’s also not possible to set many preferences, as certain project properties show up as blank, and certain buttons are missing. It’s absolutely abysmal that Adobe hasn’t remedied these issues; how does it expect developers to do any serious Flex development on 64 bit Windows that’s becoming mainstream?

Fortunately, there is a workaround, at least for the issues that affected me. The solution lies in having a working copy of Flex Builder on a 32-bit Windows platform. Flex stores these preferences in %USERPROFILE%\My Documents\Flex Builder 3\.metadata ( %USERPROFILE% is the environment variable with a typical value of “C:\Documents and Settings\{username}” on Windows XP, and “C:\Users\{username}” on Windows 7), and subfolders therein.

To configure your installed Flex SDKs, first unzip your Flex SDK to “C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Flex Builder 3\sdks” (or wherever it is on your system); there is a file at the top level called flex-sdk-description.xml. Open this up and make a note of the <name> element. Next, open the file “%USERPROFILE%\My Documents\Flex Builder 3\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.core.runtime\.settings\com.adobe.flexbuilder.project.prefs”. This is where you’ll insert the setting for com.adobe.flexbuilder.project.flex_sdks, making sure you use the SDK name noted earlier. My entire file looks like this (without the line breaks before “\r\n”):

My other main problem was that I needed to debug the Flex application, but I was unable to add the launch configuration under Run/Debug Settings of the project properties—the New, Duplicate, Edit, and Delete buttons are missing and cannot be activated via the Windows shortcut keys. If your project is called ProjectX, you’ll need to have a file called “%USERPROFILE%\My Documents\Flex Builder 3\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.debug.core\.launches\ProjectX.launch”. For me, the .launches folder wasn’t there, so I copied it from my 32-bit system. You can create the .launches folder manually, though not from Windows Explorer (you may have to use the command line). My file looks like this:

For any other properties, you can search for a relevant string in the .metadata folder of your 32-bit machine, then copy or create the appropriate file in your 64-bit system. It’s a pain, but at least you’ll be able to get your work done.